This is an excerpt taken from our latest whitepaper: SAM Insourcing Vs Outsourcing where we explore numerous factors that need to be understood and weighed up before an informed decision can be made. In this piece we cover:
The SAM Journey, where inefficiency can lead to an over-spend of up to 30% each year.
The stages below highlight the areas that need to be considered when implementing effective SAM, whether you are going to manage internally or externally.
In fact, these processes are vital to helping your organisation understand what it requires as they provide a basis from which you can evaluate the pros and cons of insourcing and outsourcing.
Review
It is essential that risks produced from existing hardware and software license management activities are identified prior to implementation. Correctly defined project requirements and focusing on areas that guarantee the greatest return on investment is essential. This must include, reviewing the policies, processes and systems required to deliver effective SAM.
Discover
Selecting the right SAM tools can be extremely challenging and always depends on first fully understanding the metrics needed to be measured and controlled. Organisations need to follow an objective selection process, ensuring requirements are correctly defined and that any technology platform being considered, delivers expected outcomes, which can only be done by insisting potential vendors fully demonstrate their system to deliver accordingly.
Measure
Essential for any effective SAM program are the processes required to protect, control and manage license user rights, whilst ensuring allocation and consumption of those rights are maximised and allocated effectively. License experts are required to perform this complex reconciliation process, ensuring you understand and can maintain your compliance position.
Optimise
License Optimisation is the process of managing and controlling your software assets, ensuring that your company is maximising the consumption of existing product user rights, minimising total cost of ownership and purchasing with greater efficiency and confidence. Most organisations recognise that, without having accurate and up to date software license information available when purchasing software licenses, it is near impossible to ensure that the company is licensed correctly. In addition, without the controls in place to monitor usage and check license availability, many organisations purchase too many licenses.
To identify and realise significant cost savings you must be able to carefully analyse your Effective License Position (ELP) and with the implementation of common sense processes, you should be able to achieve savings using a number of optimisation techniques.
Control
SAM is an ongoing process not an event and with a forever changing market, you must continue to maintain your systems and processes.
Inefficiency can lead to an over-spend of up to 30% each year.
It is only with the right skills and knowledge that you will be able to continue to base line your ELP and ensure your organisation is able to maximising license consumption and drive significant cost savings into the future.